I just beat Doom 3: BFG Edition's new episode "The Lost Mission" and I thought it was fantastic. I tried my best to not read anything about it beforehand, but what little I did read seemed negative and dismissive; like it was just thrown together haphazardly as a cheap marketing tactic.

As a huge fan of Doom 3's gameplay, it's clear to me that this was created by like-minded people with a passion for making a product worthy of the Doom 3 legacy. A lot of thought was obviously put into every spawn point and every item's placement. It's a tight, action-packed experience that continually surprises you and treats you to a barrage of Doom 3's best assets. And although, I disagree that it was sloppily thrown together, and am not sure if it was created solely from a marketing standpoint; I can say that it rounds out the BFG Edition very nicely.

The original Doom 3 campaign is a slow burn, an amazing one, but on repeat playthroughs it can be tough waiting hours for the big enemies and weapons to show up. Resurrection Of Evil gets around that by cutting straight to the action, but it still takes some time to ramp up as it's also a decent length (at about half of of Doom 3's, which is insanely long by today's FPS standards). What The Lost Mission provides is a short, well-paced gauntlet that bombards you with huge enemies from the start, and provides you equally huge weapons with which to dispatch them.

My final playtime clocked in at just over 3 hours, but it felt a lot longer since it's so dense with action. Playing on Veteran (the lowest difficulty any Doom 3 game should ever be played on) you have to inch your way through a lot of it, and there's plenty of trial and error time that goes unaccounted for.

Nowadays it seems people are out to disparage anything new. There was even a scandalous youtube video showcasing pieces of environment and other stuff that The Lost Mission reuses from the original Doom 3; like it was done as some kind of evil scheme. The team working on The Lost Mission took the resources from Doom 3, including lots of never before seen cut content and created an awesome new chapter from it; I don't see how that's a bad thing. The levels felt completely new to me, save for one or two moments of deja vu as I passed familiar landmarks. But even then, they made perfect sense appearing in several areas of a uniform Mars installation and it was more like a quick hit of nostalgia than a feeling of being somehow ripped off. I found it to be a total non-factor, that I wouldn't have even considered had it not been pointed out so obnoxiously. As a fan who never thought there'd be more Doom 3 to play, I'm super grateful to have been given this new chapter.

Overall, it greatly exceeded my expectations. I didn't anticipate any significant dialogue, I really didn't expect new enemies, and I never imagined it'd include a boat ride through hell. But it hit all the marks of the original and its expansion; just in a condensed fashion. The only criticism I have is that some of the voice acting in the audio logs was campier than in previous iterations, but it's a minor issue as there are very few of them present. I was, however, surprised yet again by the couple memorable comedic moments and cool story bits they managed to squeeze into them. From now on, If you need a Doom 3 instant action fix in the highest concentration possible, this is the place to get it. As a short bonus campaign, I think The Lost Mission was executed just about perfectly.

And now my new unrealistic dream is that they'll release a level editor for console players so we can create endless Doom 3 gauntlets of our own.